2 agitating Indian workers in Bahrain deported
Dubai, February 12
Faced with a number of strikes involving more than 2,000 workers, majority of them Indians, authorities in Bahrain began acting tough by deporting two Indian labourers, as trade unions expressed support for the agitators.

Indian don to head Oxford biz school
London, February 12
Lalit Johri, an Indian-origin academic at the University of Oxford is overseeing the new version of the Oxford Advanced Management Programme at the university’s Said Business School.

Kidney king’s brother took a lift to escape police
Kathmandu, February 12
While Indian kidney racket kingpin Amit Kumar was arrested by Nepal Police in a dramatic swoop last week from a holiday resort in the southern plains, did his brother and accomplice Jeevan Kumar manage to give the posse the slip just minutes before?

DIVORCE BATTLE: Paul McCartney, and lawyer Fiona Shackleton, leave the high court at lunch time, in London on Tuesday. Paul McCartney and Heather Mills faced off in one of the biggest and most bitter divorce battles in showbusines history on Monday with a slice of his massive Beatles fortune at stake. — Reuters

Australian troops arrive in E Timor; Prez stable
Canberra, February 12
East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was in a serious but stable condition in an Australian hospital, but medics were planning more surgery for up to three gunshot wounds, a senior doctor said.

Pak unsure if missing envoy kidnapped
Islamabad, February 12
The Pakistani authorities said today they didn’t know whether their ambassador to Afghanistan had been kidnapped, a day after he went missing in a Pakistani tribal region plagued by bandits and militants.

2 Pak N-officials ‘abducted’
Peshawar, February 12
Two Pakistani nuclear energy officials have been abducted by masked men from a troubled northwestern area near the Afghan border, police said on Tuesday.
The kidnappers bundled the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission workers and their driver into a vehicle in Sheikh Badin, a town in militancy-hit Dera Ismail Khan district, local police chief Akbar Nasir said.

37 rescued as yacht sinks
Sydney, February 12
Rescue helicopters winched 37 persons from a sinking yacht off Australia’s northeast coast today, after it was washed on to rocks and holed. Seas swept the twin-mast yacht named the Romance on to rocks off Hook Island on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, rescue officials said.

A spate of strikes by nearly 2,500 foreign workers, a majority of them Indians, over the minimum wages paid to them has forced the Bahraini Parliament to take up the issue in its upcoming
session.

Bahrain’s labour minister Majeed Al Alawi has been summoned before the Shura Council to answer a question on what is being done to protect the rights of expat workers.

Dubai, February 12
Faced with a number of strikes involving more than 2,000 workers, majority of them Indians, authorities in Bahrain began acting tough by deporting two Indian labourers, as trade unions expressed support for the agitators.

Indians officials told PTI over phone that they have been urging the workers not to go on strike since the action is illegal under the country’s laws.

Authorities began cracking the whip on agitators by deporting two Indians, who acted as spokesmen for workers of the Hafeera Contracting Company, who downed their tools on Saturday demanding a hike in their salary.

The two-G Balakrishnan and Mohammed Shafi-were sent home on separate flights.

Before boarding his flight home, Balakrishnan said company chairman Isa Mohammed Abdulrahim had visited the camp and asked for five representatives to go with him to the company office to discuss their demands.

Abdulrahim agreed to raise the workers’ salaries from next month, though no specific amount was agreed, he said. The unskilled workers get a monthly basic salary of Bahrain Dinars 50 (Rs 5,275) while the semi-skilled workers get BD60.

“We were afraid of being deported and asked the boss specifically if the five of us would be deported, or punished in any way for representing the workers. He promised us that nothing would happen to us and we believed him,” Balakrishnan said. But a company vehicle from the work-site in Sitra picked up Balakrishnan at around 1pm on Monday and he was told to pack up.

Meanwhile, one of Bahrain’s biggest contracting companies has refused to hike the pay of nearly 1,800 striking labourers, of whom 1,400 are Indians.

Workers of G P Zachariades stopped work on Saturday demanding better salaries and complaining about poor living conditions.

Labour Minister Dr Majeed Al Alawi has issued an order to set up of a committee headed by Under-Secretary Shaikh Abdulrahman bin Abdulla Al Khalifa to resolve the strike.

Al Alawi said investigations showed that the company adheres to health and safety laws and the strike had been triggered by a misunderstanding of an announcement by India that it was implementing a BD100-per-month (Rs 1,545) minimum wage for its workers taking up jobs in Bahrain, from March 1.

The workers say they are being paid a basic salary of BD57 a month and claim that there was a lack of medical facilities and hot water at their labour camp.
— PTI

London, February 12
Forget Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where it’s rampant. Even Britain is no exception when it comes to cheating in examinations.

According to official figures, more than 4,000 students were caught copying in A-level and GCSE examinations in Britain last summer, The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Mobiles, notes and dictionaries were some of the banned items that students smuggled past invigilators.

In fact, the cell phones were used by examinees to text friends for answers or to access the Internet for information, the British government’s examination watchdog Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) said.

In total, 4,258 cases of ‘malpractice’ in GCSE and A-level exams were recorded in 2007, against 4,757 in 2006.

According to the QCA report, there were 1,620 cases of unauthorised material smuggled into the examination halls, with 1,000 believed to be mobile phones as well as other electronic gadgets.

Altogether 24 schools were warned for helping children through examinations — usually exposed when more than one student gives the same answer — compared with just two cases two years ago.

Examiners are now planning to conduct snap inspections of schools that had problems with cheating in 2007.

“There is no excuse for cheating or coaching, but this just emphasises the huge amount of pressure teachers are under to ensure children pass,” Mick Brookes, the General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said.
— PTI

London, February 12
Lalit Johri, an Indian-origin academic at the University of Oxford is overseeing the new version of the Oxford Advanced Management Programme at the university’s Said Business School.

Since its inception in 1983, the Oxford Advanced Management Programme (Oxford AMP) has attracted more than 1100 senior executives from over 80 countries.

In 2008, a new version of the Oxford AMP will be launched by Johri, the new programme director, to reflect emerging issues faced by its participants and their organisations.

Johri has taught as a professor at Delhi University. He joined the Said Business School in 2007 to spearhead the research and development required to redesign the programme.

“The programme has had many revisions over the years to ensure that it was keeping pace with the latest thinking and with management education best-practices, but we wanted to initiate a more comprehensive and thorough-going review of the programme to retains its leading position in the market,” Johri said.

“Based on extensive market research with past participants and some of our corporate partners in different parts of the world, we have redesigned the programme and it is now highly relevant for the environment in which organisations are operating.”

The Oxford AMP is an intensive four-week programme providing a forum for participants to share views on how external and internal pressures affect them as individuals and their
organisations. — PTI

Kathmandu, February 12
While Indian kidney racket kingpin Amit Kumar was arrested by Nepal Police in a dramatic swoop last week from a holiday resort in the southern plains, did his brother and accomplice Jeevan Kumar manage to give the posse the slip just minutes before?

A Nepali daily on Tuesday said that a petty trader from Chitwan was claiming he gave a lift to the fugitive brother without knowing who Jeevan was. Chitwan is the picturesque town where Amit Kumar was arrested on Thursday after his illegal kidney factory in Gurgaon near New Delhi came to light and Interpol sounded a red alert.

Ramesh Regmi, a Nepali who operates a boat in the prime tourist district, is claiming that even as police raided Hotel Wildlife in
Chitwan, where Amit Kumar had holed up after fleeing Kathmandu, a frantic looking man came up to him and begged him for a lift on his motorcycle.

“I gave him a lift till Narayangarh as I was myself going to the VAT (value added tax) office,” the Himalayan Times daily quoted Regmi as saying.

Narayangarh is about 100 km west of Kathmandu. Major highways to the capital can be accessed from it.

Regmi said: “I thought he was a hotel guest who had a problem. How was I to know that he was an accomplice in the same racket?”

The Good Samaritan said he learnt about the identity of the man he had helped only after he saw the photographs being shown by the police team.

The claim adds credence to earlier speculation that Jeevan and Amit Kumar had fled to Kathmandu and were hiding together in the posh hotels of the capital till Indian and Nepali media raised the alarm that they could be holed up in the Himalayan nation.
— IANS

Canberra, February 12
East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was in a serious but stable condition in an Australian hospital, but medics were planning more surgery for up to three gunshot wounds, a senior doctor said.

Ramos-Horta was critically wounded at his home in Dili yesterday in an assassination attempt by rebel soldiers and was airlifted to Darwin on life support after treatment at an Australian military hospital.

“We’ll have to go back to theatre, probably in the next 24 to 36 hours for some staged surgery, but at this stage we’re looking at quite stable,” Len Notaras, general manager of Royal Darwin Hospital, told Australian radio.

Notaras said doctors performed three hours of surgery, including reconstruction of Ramos-Horta’s right lung, removing shell and bullet fragments. One fragment remained in his body.

The president could also need a skin graft, with the fear now being an infection, he said.

US President George W. Bush condemned the assassination attempts against the President and the Prime Minister and said those responsible would be held accountable.

Former Ramos-Horta adviser and close friend James Dunn, once Australia’s Consul in Dili, said the UN had apparently failed in its security task, especially given text messages circulating for three days and warning of a coup plot.

A UN spokeswoman in Dili said the accusation did “not make sense”.

“We are currently going through all our police logging times to work out the response times,” she told Reuters. “Those allegations are allegations and we are looking into it.”

In the capital Dili, East Timor’s interim president Vicente Guterres declared a state of emergency and appealed for calm. — Reuters

The Pakistan Army’s intelligence outfit, the Military Intelligence (MI), has quietly pulled out of political manipulations, military and political sources have confirmed.

The MI, which together with country’s top spy agency, Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), played crucial role in 2002 general and 2005 local government elections to influence the results.

The new army chief has initiated a vigorous drive to distance the army from politics and corps commanders have been strictly forbidden from involving themselves in the upcoming elections due on February 18. The MI, which comes directly under the army chief, has also discreetly pulled itself out of the fray.

President Musharraf appointed a close confident and distant relation as MI chief before relinquishing army post. The civil intelligence agency, Intelligence Bureau (IB) is also effectively under the President whose chief, a retired brigadier, was named by Benazir as a co-conspirator, who might engineer her killing.

The election cell of the PPP has acknowledged that unlike the past it had received no complaint from its candidates against the MI ever since the new orders were issued.

There is, however, no final word available about the political role of the ISI, since it is out of General Kayani’s purview.

The complaints against intelligence agencies were part of the report, which Benazir Bhutto was to handover to the visiting US senators the day she was assassinated.

300 revert back to army from civil posts

Moving swiftly on his reform policy to restore army’s image, Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has ordered withdrawal of more than 300 military personnel currently posted in various civil departments on secondment.

“Immediately 152 or almost 50 per cent of such military personnel in 23 civilian departments stand reverted to the Pakistan Army,” according to an order issued by the General Headquarters (GHQ) in compliance with Kayani’s orders.

The withdrawal of Army officers from the civilian departments has been ordered just a week before the general elections on February 18. General Kayani has already ordered military officers not to hold meetings with politicians. Significantly, the directive had its immediate impact on country’s much-dreaded anti-corruption outfit, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), which has been accused by opposition politicians of targeting them to advance President Musharraf’s political agenda of intimidating them and buying loyalty of scores in a bid to stitch together a loyal coalition.

Islamabad, February 12
The Pakistani authorities said today they didn’t know whether their ambassador to Afghanistan had been kidnapped, a day after he went missing in a Pakistani tribal region plagued by bandits and militants.

Ambassador Tariq Azizuddin was on his way to Kabul from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar when he disappeared along with his driver and bodyguard in the Khyber tribal region.

“The search is on. We have nothing to share at the stage,” foreign office spokesman, Muhammad Sadiq, told Reuters. He refused to speculate whether the envoy had been kidnapped.

“We don’t know what happened, we have no idea,” Sadiq said.

“There is no confirmation that he has been kidnapped.” A security official said the envoy was to change cars at the border but he did not show up and was believed to have not reached the border. The Khyber Pass is the main road link to landlocked Afghanistan in northwestern Pakistan.

Khyber is notorious for smugglers and bandits, but unlike other parts of the tribal belt on the Afghan border it has been relatively free of the violence linked to Al-Qaida and the Taliban, though militant activity has picked up in adjoining regions.
— Reuters

Peshawar, February 12
Two Pakistani nuclear energy officials have been abducted by masked men from a troubled northwestern area near the Afghan border, police said on Tuesday.

The kidnappers bundled the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) workers and their driver into a vehicle in Sheikh Badin, a town in militancy-hit Dera Ismail Khan district, local police chief Akbar Nasir said.

“They were technicians from the PAEC, they were whisked away early Monday morning,” Nasir said.

The officials were on a routine visit to conduct a geological survey for mineral exploration in the mountainous area, which adjoins Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions, the police chief said.

“We don’t know if the abductors were militants or members of some criminal gang,” he said, adding that they were believed to be from the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

“A search is underway, we are contacting local people,” he said.

The abduction of the PAEC officials came on the same day as the disappearance of Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan on his way from the northwestern city of Peshawar to the Afghan capital Kabul on Monday.

The envoy, Tariq Azizuddin, was feared abducted in the tribal district of Khyber, raising concern about growing insecurity ahead of parliamentary polls set for Monday.
— AFP

Sydney, February 12
Rescue helicopters winched 37 persons from a sinking yacht off Australia’s northeast coast today, after it was washed on to rocks and holed. Seas swept the twin-mast yacht named the Romance on to rocks off Hook Island on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, rescue officials said.

Emergency management Queensland said it was too dangerous to rescue the 32 passengers and 5 crew using boats, so two helicopters were brought in to winch them to safety.

A helicopter rescue crewman was lowered on to the yacht, lying at a 45-degree angle on rocks and being pounded by waves, and lashed tether lines from the boat to trees on shore.

But the plan for some passengers to climb along the tether lines to shore was abandoned because of high waves and strong winds.

“All passengers have now been flown to nearby Hayman Island and will be assessed by the onboard paramedic and doctor,” Emergency Management Queensland said.
— Reuters